No, I was not raised as a Christian and I was agnostic back then. I became interested in defining some of my spiritual and political views in 2007 and then had a full-blown existential crisis in 2008 that led to belief in some kind of God (and, I think, real experience of God). I read a lot of history, philosophy, theology, science, etc. trying to find answers. I studied various religions and visited some places of worship. I went through a period where I was very interested in Islam before turning away for various reasons. I never really considered Christianity because the form of Evangelical Protestantism that I was familiar with I found abhorrent (still do). Of course, my days in Metal had also given me a sort of antagonism towards Christianity that didn't have any real substantive basis (I think I listened to MOSTLY anti-Christian and satanic bands). In 2009 I learned about Orthodox Christianity and read a book called "The Orthodox Way" by a bishop (Kallistos Ware) that I found very compelling and moving and that led me into philosophical alignment with the Ancient Christianity of the Early Church. By then I had sort of settled into college and put some of those questions on the backburner so I didn't pursue conversion to Orthodoxy (and I was still interested in exploring the existence of the other Christian denominations for some stupid reason). I visited many churches, but never settled in anywhere. In 2014, I got cancer which was a serious reminder that I needed to actually act upon the things I had come to believe intellectually. I became a catechumen in the Orthodox Church in 2015 and was baptized in 2017. I've found that Orthodox Christianity has very little in common with what people in the West think of when they think of Christianity and I wish it was the normative form of the Faith that people came into contact with because Roman Catholicism and (especially) the myriad forms of Protestantism are tremendous misrepresentations.
That's the cliff notes version anyhow.
